Over the past week or so, Jonathan Chait and I have enjoyed an ongoing debate over the rhetoric the president employs when addressing African Americans. Here is my initial installment, Chait's initial rebuttal, my subsequent reply, and Chait's latest riposte. Initially Chait argued that President Obama's habit of speaking about culture before black audiences was laudable because it would "urge positive habits and behavior" that are presumably found especially wanting in the black community.

Chait argued that this lack of sufficient "positive habits and behaviors" stemmed from cultural echoes of past harms, which now exist "independent" of white supremacy. Chait now concedes that this assertion is unsupportable and attempts to recast his original argument:

I attributed the enduring culture of poverty to the residue of slavery, terrorism, segregation, and continuing discrimination.

Not quite (my emphasis):

The argument is that structural conditions shape culture, and culture, in turn, can take on a life of its own independent of the forces that created it. It would be bizarre to imagine that centuries of slavery, followed by systematic terrorism, segregation, discrimination, a legacy wealth gap, and so on did not leave a cultural residue that itself became an impediment to success.

The phrase "culture of poverty" doesn't actually appear in Chait's original argument. Nor should it—the history he cites was experienced by all variety of African Americans, poor or not. Moreover, the majority of poor people in America have neither the experience of segregation nor slavery in their background. Chait is conflating two different things: black culture—which was shaped by, and requires, all the forces he named; and "a culture of poverty," which requires none of them.

That conflation undergirds his latest column. Chait paraphrases my argument that "there is no such thing as a culture of poverty." His evidence of this is quoting me attacking the "the notion that black culture is part of the problem." This evidence only works if you believe "black culture" and "a culture of poverty" are somehow interchangeable.

Making no effort to distinguish the two, Chait examines a piece I wrote in 2010 entitled "A Culture of Poverty" in which I sought to explain the difficulty of navigating culture in two different worlds—one in which "Thou shalt not be punked" was a commandment, and another where violence was best left to the authorities:

I think one can safely call that an element of a kind of street culture. It's also an element which—once one leaves the streets—is a great impediment. "I ain't no punk" may shield you from neighborhood violence. But it can not shield you from algebra, when your teacher tries to correct you. It can not shield you from losing hours, when your supervisor corrects your work. And it would not have shielded me from unemployment, after I cold-cocked a guy over a blog post.

Chait calls this one of the most "memorable essays" he's ever read. This is too kind—both to my writing and to his memory. Chait reads the piece as evidence of having "grown up around cultural norms that inhibited economic success." In fact, my behavior was the result of having grown up around cultural norms that enabled my survival. I said as much in the original piece:

The problem is that rarely do such critiques ask why anyone would embrace such values. Moreover, they tend to assume that there's something uniquely "black" about those values, and their the embrace. If you are a young person living in an environment where violence is frequent and random, the willingness to meet any hint of violence with yet more violence is a shield.

Using the wrong tool for the job is a problem that extends beyond the dining room. The set of practices required for a young man to secure his safety on the streets of his troubled neighborhood are not the same as those required to place him on an honor roll, and these are not the same as the set of practices required to write the great American novel. The way to guide him through this transition is not to insult his native language.

For black men like us, the feeling of having something to lose, beyond honor and face, is foreign. We grew up in communities—New York, Baltimore, Chicago—where the Code of the Streets was the first code we learned. Respect and reputation are everything there. These values are often denigrated by people who have never been punched in the face. But when you live around violence there is no opting out. A reputation for meeting violence with violence is a shield. That protection increases when you are part of a crew with that same mind-set. This is obviously not a public health solution, but within its context, the Code is logical. Outside of its context, the Code is ridiculous.

The point has obviously eluded Chait. Instead of considering that I may well have been responding to my actual lived circumstances, Chait chooses to assume that I was responding to some inscrutable call of the wild:

When the imprint of this culture was nearly strong enough to derail the career of a writer as brilliant as Coates, we are talking about a powerful force, indeed.

What's missed here is that the very culture Chait derides might well be the reason why I am sitting here debating him in the first place. That culture contained a variety of values and practices. "I ain't no punk" was one of them. "Know your history" was another. "Words are beautiful" was another still. The key is cultural dexterity—understanding when to emphasize which values, and when to employ which practices.

Chait endorses a blunter approach:

The circa-2008 Ta-Nehisi Coates was neither irresponsible nor immoral. Rather, he had grown up around cultural norms that inhibited economic success. People are the products of their environment. Environments are amenable to public policy. Some of the most successful anti-poverty initiatives, like the Harlem Children’s Zone or the KIPP schools, are designed around the premise that children raised in concentrated poverty need to be taught middle class norms.

No, they need to be taught that all norms are not transferable into all worlds. In my case, physical assertiveness might save you on the street but not beyond it. At the same time, other values are transferrable and highly useful. The "cultural norms" of my community also asserted that much of what my country believes about itself is a lie. In the spirit of Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, and Malcolm X, it was my responsibility to live, prosper, and attack the lie. Those values saved me on the street, and they sustain me in this present moment.

People who take a strict binary view of culture ("culture of privilege = awesome; culture of poverty = fail") are afflicted by the provincialism of privilege and thus vastly underestimate the dynamism of the greater world. They extoll "middle-class values" to the ignorance and exclusion of all others. To understand, you must imagine what it means to confront algebra in the morning and "Shorty, can I see your bike?" in the afternoon. It's very nice to talk about "middle-class values" when that describes your small, limited world. But when your grandmother lives in one hood and your coworkers live another, you generally need something more than "middle-class values." You need to be bilingual.

In 2008, I was living in central Harlem, an area of New York whose demographics closely mirrored the demographics of my youth. The practices I brought to bear in that tent were not artifacts. I was not under a spell of pathology. I was employing the tools I used to navigate the everyday world I lived. It just so happened that the world in which I worked was different. As I said in that original piece, "There is nothing particularly black about this." I strongly suspect that white people who've grown up around entrenched poverty and violence will find that there are certain practices that safeguard them at home but not so much as they journey out. This point is erased if you believe that "black culture" is simply another way of saying "culture of poverty."

This elision is not particular to Chait. In the 1960s, when 20 percent of black children were found to be born out of wedlock, progressives went to war over the "tangle of pathologies" choking black America. Today, 30 percent of white children are being born out of wedlock. The reaction to this shift has been considerably more muted. This makes sense if you believe that pathology is something reserved for black people. When The New Republic wanted to dramatize the evils of AFDC, there was really no doubt about whose portrait they'd pick.

Accepting the premise that "black culture" and "a culture of poverty" are interchangeable also has the benefit of making the president's rhetoric much more understandable. One begins to get why the president would address a group of graduates from an elite black college on the tendency of young men in the black community to make "bad choices." Or why the president goes before black audiences and laments the fact that the proportion of single-parent households has doubled, and carry no such message to white audiences—despite the fact that single parenthood is growing fastest among whites. And you can understand how an initiative that began with the killing of a black boy who was not poor, and who had a loving father, becomes fuel for the assertion that "nothing keeps a young man out of trouble like a father." In his best work, Chait mercilessly dissects this kind of intellectual slipperiness. Now we find him applauding it and reifying it.

"Culture is hard, though not impossible, to quantify," writes Chait. "Which does not mean it doesn’t exist." Indeed. I have done my best to identify specific cultural practices and outline how they work in different worlds. Much of that evidence is built on memoir, and thus necessarily subject to an uncomfortable vagueness.

But quantifying the breadth and effect of white supremacy suffers no such drawbacks. Some of our most celebrated scholarship—Battle Cry of Freedom, Reconstruction, The Making of the Second Ghetto, The Warmth of Other Suns, At the Hands of Persons Unknown, Family Properties, Confederate Reckoning, Black Wealth/White Wealth, American Apartheid, Crabgrass Frontier, The Origins of the Urban Crisis, When and Where I Enter, When Affirmative Action Was White—is directed toward, with great specificity, outlining the reach and effects of white supremacy.

It is not wholly surprising that Barack Obama tends not to focus on this literature, whatever its merits. I do not expect the president of the United States to make a habit of speaking unvarnished and uncomfortable truths. (Though he is often brilliant when he does.) Of course removing white supremacy from the equation puts Barack Obama in the odd position of focusing on that which is hardest to evidence, while slighting that which is clearly known.

Jonathan Chait is not a politician. He needs neither to assemble a 60-vote majority nor worry about his words affecting the midterms. I'm happy that Chait decided to engage me here on a subject that he, himself, confesses is hard to quantify. I wish I'd had his input over the past few months when I was poring over redlining maps and grappling with the racism implicit in the New Deal. I wish I'd had his input when I was attempting to understand what it meant that in 1860 this country's most valuable asset was enslaved human beings. I think had we engaged each other then, he might well not have written something like this:

It is hard to explain how the United States has progressed from chattel slavery to emancipation to the end of lynching to the end of legal segregation to electing an African-American president if America has “rarely” been the ally of African-Americans and “often” its nemesis. It is one thing to notice the persistence of racism, quite another to interpret the history of black America as mainly one of continuity rather than mainly one of progress.

This certainly is a specimen of progress—much like the ill-tempered man might "progress" from shooting at his neighbors to clubbing them and then finally settle on simply robbing them. His victims, bloodied, beaten, and pilfered, might view his "progress" differently. Effectively Chait's rendition of history amounts to, "How can you say I have a history of violence given that I've repeatedly stopped pummeling you?"

Chait's jaunty and uplifting narrative flattens out the chaos of history under the cheerful rubric of American progress. The actual events are more complicated. It's true, for instance, that slavery was legal in the United States in 1860 and five years later it was not. That is because a clique of slaveholders greatly overestimated its own power and decided to go to war with its country. Had the Union soundly and quickly defeated the Confederacy, it's very likely that slavery would have remained. Instead the war dragged on, and the Union was forced to employ blacks in its ranks. The end result—total emancipation—was more a matter of military necessity than moral progress.

We can not spare the hundred and forty or fifty thousand now serving us as soldiers, seamen, and laborers. This is not a question of sentiment or taste, but one of physical force which may be measured and estimated as horse-power and steam-power are measured and estimated. Keep it and you can save the Union. Throw it away, and the Union goes with it.

The United States of America did not save black people; black people saved the United States of America. With that task complete, our "ally" proceeded to repay its debt to its black citizens by pretending they did not exist. In 1875, Mississippi's provisional governor, Adelbert Ames, watched as the majority-black state's nascent democracy "progressed" from terrorism to anarchy and then apartheid. Taking in regular reports of blacks being murdered, whipped, and intimidated by the Ku Klux Klan, Ames wrote the administration of President Ulysses Grant begging for aid. The Grant Administration declined:

The whole public are tired of these autumnal outbreaks in the South, and the great majority are ready now to condemn any interference on the part of the government.

A horrified and exasperated Ames told his wife that blacks in Mississippi

... are to be returned to a condition of serfdom—an era of second slavery .... The nation should have acted but it was “tired of the annual autumnal outbreaks in the South” .... The political death of the negro will forever release the nation from the weariness from such “political outbreaks.” You may think I exaggerate. Time will show you how accurate my statements are.

Ames was totally accurate. For the next century, the United States legitimized the overthrow of legal governments, the reduction of black people to forced laborers, and the complete alienation—at gunpoint—of black people in the South from the sphere of politics.

Chait's citation of the end of lynching as evidence of America serving as an "ally" is especially bizarre. The United States never passed anti-lynching legislation, a disgrace so great that it compelled the Senate to apologize—in 2005.

"There may be no other injustice in American history," said Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu, "for which the Senate so uniquely bears responsibility." Even then, a half century after Emmett Till's murder, the sitting senators from Mississippi—the state with the most lynchings—declined to endorse the apology.

"You don't stick a knife in a man's back nine inches," said Malcolm X, "and then pull it out six inches and say you're making progress."

The notion that black America's long bloody journey was accomplished through frequent alliance with the United States is an assailant's-eye view of history. It takes no note of the fact that in 1860, most of this country's exports were derived from the forced labor of the people it was "allied" with. It takes no note of this country electing senators who, on the Senate floor, openly advocated domestic terrorism. It takes no note of what it means for a country to tolerate the majority of the people living in a state like Mississippi being denied the right to vote. It takes no note of what it means to exclude black people from the housing programs, from the GI Bills, that built the American middle class. Effectively it takes no serious note of African-American history, and thus no serious note of American history.

You see this in Chait's belief that he lives in a country "whose soaring ideals sat uncomfortably aside an often cruel reality." No. Those soaring ideals don't sit uncomfortably aside the reality but comfortably on top of it. The "cruel reality" made the "soaring ideals" possible.

By giving the United States its leading export staple, the workers in the cotton fields enabled the country not only to buy manufactured goods from Europe but also to pay interest on its foreign debt and continue to import more capital to invest in transportation and industry. Much of Atlantic civilization in the nineteenth century was built on the back of the enslaved field hand.

From Edmund Morgan's foundational American Slavery, American Freedom:

In the republican way of thinking as Americans inherited it from England, slavery occupied a critical, if ambiguous, position: it was the primary evil that men sought to avoid for society as a whole by curbing monarchs and establishing republics. But it was also the solution to one of society’s most serious problems, the problem of the poor. Virginians could outdo English republicans as well as New England ones, partly because they had solved the problem: they had achieved a society in which most of the poor were enslaved.

White supremacy does not contradict American democracy—it birthed it, nurtured it, and financed it. That is our heritage. It was reinforced during 250 years of bondage. It was further reinforced during another century of Jim Crow. It was reinforced again when progressives erected an entire welfare state on the basis of black exclusion. It was reinforced again when the intellectual progeny of the same people who excluded black women from welfare turned around and inveighed against it through caricaturization of black women.

Jonathan Chait is arguably the sharpest political writer of his generation. If even he subscribes to a sophomoric feel-good rendering of his country's past, what does that say about the broader American imagination?

And none of this is even new:

The record is there for all to read. It resounds all over the world. It might as well be written in the sky. One wishes that–Americans—white Americans—would read, for their own sakes, this record and stop defending themselves against it. Only then will they be enabled to change their lives. The fact that they have not yet been able to do this—to face their history to change their lives—hideously menaces this country. Indeed, it menaces the entire world.

James Baldwin was not being cute here. If you can not bring yourself to grapple with that which literally built your capitol, then you are not truly grappling with your country. And if you are not truly grappling with your country, then your beliefs in its role in the greater world (exporter of democracy, for instance) are built on sand. Confronting the black experience means confronting the limits of America, and perhaps, humanity itself. That is the confrontation that graduates us out of the ranks of national cheerleading and into the school of hard students.

Chait thinks this view is "fatalistic." I think God is fatalistic. In the end, we all die. As do most societies. As do most states. As do most planets. If America is fatally flawed, if white supremacy does truly dog us until we are no more, all that means is that we were unexceptional, that we were not favored by God, that we were flawed—as are all things conceived by mortal man.

I find great peace in that. And I find great meaning in this struggle that was gifted to me by my people, that was gifted to me by culture.

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In the landscape where Mad Max: Fury Road was filmed, a scientist is trying to understand a natural phenomenon that has eluded explanation for decades.

One evening earlier this spring, German naturalist Norbert Jürgens strayed from his expedition in the Namib Desert. He walked away from his campsite beside Leopard Rock, a huge pile of schist slabs stacked like left-over roofing tiles, and into a vast plain ringed with red-burnished hills. He had 20 minutes of light left before sunset, and he intended to use them.

This next part may sound like a reenactment from a nature documentary, but trust me: This is how it went down.

Off by himself, Jürgens dropped down to his knees. He sank his well-tanned arms in the sand up to the elbows. As he rooted around, he told me later, he had a revelation.

At the time, I was watching from the top of Leopard Rock, which offered a bird’s-eye view of both Jürgens and his expedition’s quarry. Across the plain, seemingly stamped into its dry, stubbly grass, were circles of bare ground, each about the size of an aboveground pool. Jürgens, a professor at the University of Hamburg, was digging—and pondering—in one of these bare patches.

The class divide is already toxic, and is fast becoming unbridgeable. You’re probably part of the problem.

1. The Aristocracy Is Dead …

For about a week every year in my childhood, I was a member of one of America’s fading aristocracies. Sometimes around Christmas, more often on the Fourth of July, my family would take up residence at one of my grandparents’ country clubs in Chicago, Palm Beach, or Asheville, North Carolina. The breakfast buffets were magnificent, and Grandfather was a jovial host, always ready with a familiar story, rarely missing an opportunity for gentle instruction on proper club etiquette. At the age of 11 or 12, I gathered from him, between his puffs of cigar smoke, that we owed our weeks of plenty to Great-Grandfather, Colonel Robert W. Stewart, a Rough Rider with Teddy Roosevelt who made his fortune as the chairman of Standard Oil of Indiana in the 1920s. I was also given to understand that, for reasons traceable to some ancient and incomprehensible dispute, the Rockefellers were the mortal enemies of our clan.

The text reflected not only the president’s signature syntax, but also the clash between his desire for credit and his intuition to walk away.

Donald Trump’s approach to North Korea has always been an intensely personal one—the president contended that his sheer force of will and negotiating prowess would win the day, and rather than use intermediaries, he planned for a face-to-face meeting, with himself and Kim Jong Un on either side of a table.

So Trump’s notice on Thursday that he was canceling the June 12 summit in Singapore was fitting. It arrived in the form of a letter that appears to have been written by the president himself. The missive features a Trumpian mix of non sequiturs, braggadocio, insults, flattery, and half-truths. Whether the dramatic letter marks the end of the current process or is simply a negotiating feint, it matches the soap-operatic series of events that proceeded it. Either way, it displays the ongoing conflict between Trump’s desire for pageantry and credit and his longstanding dictum that one must be willing to walk away from the negotiating table.

The 9-year-old has built a huge following with profane Instagram posts, but the bravado of “the youngest flexer of the century” masks a sadder tale about fame and exploitation.

In mid-February, a mysterious 9-year-old by the name of Lil Tay began blowing up on Instagram.

“This is a message to all y’all broke-ass haters, y’all ain't doing it like Lil Tay,” she shouts as she hops into a red Mercedes, hands full of wads of cash. “This is why all y’all fucking haters hate me, bitch. This shit cost me $200,000. I’m only 9 years old. I don’t got no license, but I still drive this sports car, bitch. Your favorite rapper ain’t even doing it like Lil Tay.”

Referring to herself as “the youngest flexer of the century,” Lil Tay quickly garnered a fan base of millions, including big name YouTubers who saw an opportunity to capitalize on her wild persona. In late January, RiceGum, an extremely influential YouTube personality dedicated an entire roast video to Lil Tay.

A short—and by no means exhaustive—list of the open questions swirling around the president, his campaign, his company, and his family.

President Trump speculated on Tuesday that “if” the FBI placed a spy inside his campaign, that would be one of the greatest scandals in U.S. history. On Wednesday morning on Twitter, the “if” dropped away—and Trump asserted yesterday’s wild surmise as today’s fact. By afternoon, a vast claque of pro-Trump talkers repeated the president’s fantasies and falsehoods in their continuing project to represent Donald Trump as an innocent victim of a malicious conspiracy by the CIA, FBI, and Department of Justice.

The president’s claims are false, but they are not fantasies. They are strategies to fortify the minds of the president’s supporters against the ever-mounting evidence against the president. As Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz show in their new book about impeachment, an agitated and committed minority can suffice to protect a president from facing justice for even the most strongly proven criminality.

As recently as the 1950s, possessing only middling intelligence was not likely to severely limit your life’s trajectory. IQ wasn’t a big factor in whom you married, where you lived, or what others thought of you. The qualifications for a good job, whether on an assembly line or behind a desk, mostly revolved around integrity, work ethic, and a knack for getting along—bosses didn’t routinely expect college degrees, much less ask to see SAT scores. As one account of the era put it, hiring decisions were “based on a candidate having a critical skill or two and on soft factors such as eagerness, appearance, family background, and physical characteristics.”

The 2010s, in contrast, are a terrible time to not be brainy. Those who consider themselves bright openly mock others for being less so. Even in this age of rampant concern over microaggressions and victimization, we maintain open season on the nonsmart. People who’d swerve off a cliff rather than use a pejorative for race, religion, physical appearance, or disability are all too happy to drop the s‑bomb: Indeed, degrading others for being “stupid” has become nearly automatic in all forms of disagreement.

The Americans and the North Koreans were all set for a historic meeting. Then they started talking about Libya.

Of all the countries that might have acted as a spoiler for the summit in Singapore between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un—China, Russia, Japan, the United States and North Korea themselves—the one that doomed it was unexpected. It isn’t even involved in North Korea diplomacy and is locateda long 6,000 miles away from the Korean Peninsula. It’s Libya.

Yet Libya ought to have been top of mind. It’s notoriously difficult to determine what motivates the strategic choices and polices of North Korea’s leaders, but among the factors that has been evident for some time is Kim Jong Un’s fear of ending up like Muammar al-Qaddafi. The Libyan strongman was pulled from a drainage pipe and shot to death by his own people following a U.S.-led military intervention during the Arab Spring in 2011. The North Korean government views its development of nuclear weapons—a pursuit Qaddafi abandoned in the early 2000s, when his nuclear program was far less advanced than North Korea’s, in exchange for the easing of sanctions and other promised benefits—as its most reliable shield against a hostile United States that could very easily inflict a similar fate on Kim. We know this because the North Korean government has repeatedly said as much. “The Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq and the Gaddafi regime in Libya could not escape the fate of destruction after being deprived of their foundations for nuclear development and giving up nuclear programs of their own accord,” the state-run Korean Central News Agency observed in 2016.

In excusing his Arrested Development castmate’s verbal abuse of Jessica Walter, the actor showed how Hollywood has justified bad behavior for generations.

“What we do for a living is not normal,” Jason Bateman said in Wednesday’s New York Times interviewwith the cast of Arrested Development, in an effort to address his co-star Jeffrey Tambor’s admitted verbal abuse of Jessica Walter. “Therefore the process is not normal sometimes, and to expect it to be normal is to not understand what happens on set. Again, not to excuse it.” As Hollywood continues to grapple with widespread revelations of hostile work environments, institutional sexism, and sexual misconduct on and off set, Bateman insisted that he wasn’t trying to explain away an actor’s bad behavior—while displaying, over and over, exactly how his industry does it.

Bateman’s glaring mistake in the interview—for which he has already apologized—is how he rushed to defend Tambor from Walter’s account of Tambor screaming at her on the set of Arrested Development years ago. In doing so, Bateman defaulted to every entrenched cultural script of minimizing fault, downplaying misbehavior, and largely attributing Tambor’s verbal harassment to the unique, circumstantial pressures of acting—a process, he suggested, most onlookers could not hope to understand.

The billionaire’s Twitter tirade was so ill-informed it led to a subtweet from his former head of communications.

Elon Musk’s screed against the media began with a story about Tesla.

“The holier-than-thou hypocrisy of big media companies who lay claim to the truth, but publish only enough to sugarcoat the lie, is why the public no longer respects them,” the entrepreneur tweeted Wednesday, with a link to a post on the website Electrek. The author of that post criticized news coverage of recent Tesla crashes and delays in the production of the Model 3, calling it “obsessive” and saying there’s been a “general increase of misleading clickbait.”

Musk followed that tweet with an hours-long tirade in which he suggested that journalists write negative stories about Tesla to get “max clicks” and “earn advertising dollars or get fired,” blamed the press for the election of President Donald Trump, and polled users on whether he should create a website that rates “the core truth” of articles and tracks “the credibility score” of journalists, which he would consider naming Pravda, like the Soviet state-run, propaganda-ridden news agency.

The president sent a terse note to North Korea’s leader, citing “the tremendous anger and open hostility displayed in your most recent statement.”

It was going to be the first meeting between an American president and a North Korean leader in history—an audacious effort to resolve the crisis over North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons. But on Thursday—after days of bitter back-and-forth between the United States and North Korea over how to approach denuclearization, with a North Korean official threatening a “nuclear-to-nuclear showdown” with the U.S. even as the North Korean government destroyed a nuclear test site as a show of good faith—the White House abruptly announced that the June 12 summit in Singapore would not take place.

The news came in a letter from Donald Trump to Kim Jong Un, the full text of which is here:

Dear Mr. Chairman:

We greatly appreciate your time, patience, and effort with respect to our recent negotiations and discussions relative to a summit long sought by both parties, which was scheduled to take place on June 12 in Singapore. We were informed that the meeting was requested by North Korea, but that to us is totally irrelevant. I was very much looking forward to being there with you. Sadly, based on the tremendous anger and open hostility displayed in your most recent statement, I feel it is inappropriate, at this time, to have this long-planned meeting. Therefore, please let this letter serve to represent that the Singapore summit, for the good of both parties, but to the detriment of the world, will not take place. You talk about your nuclear capabilities, but ours are so massive and powerful that I pray to God they will never have to be used.

I felt a wonderful dialogue was building up between you and me, and ultimately, it is only that dialogue that matters. Some day, I look very much forward to meeting you. In the meantime, I want to thank you for the release of the hostages who are now home with their families. That was a beautiful gesture and was very much appreciated.

If you change your mind having to do with this most important summit, please do not hesitate to call me or write. The world, and North Korea in particular, has lost a great opportunity for lasting peace and great prosperity and wealth. This missed opportunity is a truly sad moment in history.